spuninst.bat

In an effort to delete the huge archive that was created when installing SP4, I ran spuninst.bat from Windows 2000 and made a complete mess out of things. Needless to say, several files were not copied since those files were busy. My hope was to reboot and rerun spuninst.bat from c: . The path I wrote down where the spuninst.bat file is located is C:winnt$NTServicePackUninstall$Spuninst. Unfortunately, I don't know how to get to $NTServicePackUninstall$. What exactly do the $ signs mean? I hope I'm not asking for too much of an education here. I can use my recover disk, but I hoped this would do it for me.

Windows 2000 no longer loads. It's going into a loop where the Windows screen appears, shuts down, and tries to load again. I can get to the Advanced Startup Options, but none of them work. It just does its loop regardless of which option I choose. I can get to the c: using a startup floppy, but that's about it.

Re: spuninst.bat

If you are able to look in the WINNT directory, you should find a whole lot of directories of the form $NtUninstallxxxxxxxxx$. These are hot-fix directories, or Service Pack directories, or MSI update directories, and a couple of other possibilities. The dollar signs mean nothing special - it was just the convention that Microsoft adopted for such folder names.

If you can't see these folders, it will be because you have to enable the displaying of hidden folders (run Windows Explorer and click on Tools -> Folder Options -> View then click the radio-button in front of "Show hidden files and folders", and then on the button above "Apply to All Folders").

This is all a bit academic if you can't get through the WIndows 2000 boot process. When powering up or rebooting, have you tried pressing F8 every five seconds or so until it goes into the screen where you can select something called Last Known Good (configuration)? See if that assists... <img src=/S/crossfingers.gif border=0 alt=crossfingers width=17 height=16>